


The Green at the Ends of the World

by schweinsty



Series: Poet Verse Fics [4]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: AU of an AU, Aftermath of Genocide, Blanket Permission, Gen, Han/Leia is background, Team and OT Characters in the Background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:42:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23887651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweinsty/pseuds/schweinsty
Summary: Leia meets Bodhi Rook several months after Jedha. Several months after Alderaan. Of all the people in the galaxy, they understand.
Relationships: Leia Organa & Bodhi Rook, Leia Organa/Han Solo
Series: Poet Verse Fics [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/656552
Comments: 21
Kudos: 113





	The Green at the Ends of the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lowbudgetcyborg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lowbudgetcyborg/gifts).



> 1\. This takes place after The Last Poem of Jedha. It won't make much sense without reading that one first. The other shorter fics in this verse were written, like this one, based on prompts by different people, and you don't need to read any of those to get this one (and, in fact there might be differences in ships or fanon between them).
> 
> 2\. This is technically AU from the Jedha verse, as Alderaan wasn't destroyed in Last Poem, so please don't @ me about discrepancies :).
> 
> 3\. Err, long story short: this fic was part of a charity drive way back in 2017, but several personal crises happened, and I wasn't able to write it until now, for various reasons. So, my very sincere apologies to lowbudgetcyborg for the wait.

There was nothing, Queen Breha always said, quite like the smell of mornings from the balconies of the palace on Aldera. When Leia was a baby, her mother would take her to the balcony in her bassinet and drink root teas with her breakfast while the sun rose.

The teas were from the doctors; for her health, since her immune system had been weak since she was a girl, so that she could grow old and watch her daughter live and rule and marry, maybe, because Breha had dreams as big as her heart.

When Leia outgrew the bassinet, she joined her mother at the table. Her father came, when he could, though more often than not he was busy at work, covering the last-minute vote rallying and lobbying calls and all the early-morning emergencies with the diplomats and courtiers so Breha could have the time for herself. She rarely had any other.

Aldera, unique among many capital cities, was green, almost as far as the eyes could see. The vines grew along the shuttlecar railing and up the walls of the houses and over the roofs of all the public buildings, and when the sunlight dried the rain and dew from the night before, the smell of green, green, green permeated the city, edging out the bakeries and the butchers and the black smoke from the tak factories down by the water. The green of the city ran as far as the feet of the mountains that ringed it, and only on the coldest winter mornings was it drowned out by snow.

“This is your home,” Breha told Leia one morning when Leia leaned over the railing and complained about the muggy air. “Wherever you go, keep it in your heart. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the galaxy.”

And then, of course, the Empire destroyed Alderaan, and there was nothing like it anywhere at all.

It took her a while to bump into the Heroes of Scarif on base, since she missed the festivities after the mission. Bodhi she didn’t meet for months.

She’d seen him in the infirmary, heading out when she headed in on her way back from the Death Star, but she was too busy with other things to pay him much attention.

One of Vader’s shots hit the gun well she was firing from, and several pieces of debris lodged in her left abdomen and arm. By the time Leia got clearance to leave the infirmary, even Cassian Andor was back on the duty roster, and the Rebellion was so overwhelmed trying to defend against the Empire’s reprisals that Leia barely got a quick congratulations on her first day back. She took on more missions than she had before, talking her way into them even when Mon Mothma took her aside and asked her if she didn’t need to rest.

She didn’t, and said so.

She had company nearly everywhere she went, at least, to mollify the others. Luke split his time training with the monk, training with Rogue Squadron, and Han primarily stayed at her side. At night sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep, he’d play card games with her and tell her the stories behind the nicks on the Falcon’s hull.

She very often couldn’t sleep.

But Yavin, at least, had its own sea of green to wander in when she went off-duty, and even though the buds weren’t quite the right shape or just the right color, it helped.

On her first mission as an envoy to a neutral planet after she returned to duty, she almost got into a shouting match with the Prime Minister of Ludova.

“A little princess with a ragtag army at her back,” he called her, and that had both Luke and Han tensing on either side of her so she had to put her hands on their arms to stop an international incident. “You couldn’t protect an orphan from a bully with the ships you have.”

“I’ll be sure, Minister,” she retorted, “to mention your concerns to—”

—and that is normally where she would have said “The queen,” but she stuttered, instead, and ended with a half-hearted “Admiral Shauven,” and excused herself shortly afterwards.

“Princess,” Han started as they left, and she shushed him.

She finally met Bodhi when he piloted a transport to pick her and several others stranded after the Battle of Hatake VI.

It had been a long wait, and they were all the worse for wear after breaking into the temple to disarm the explosives, so Leia didn’t blame the others for being particularly snippy, even as her own distemper irritated herself. Things lightened briefly when the ship arrived—and, with it, water and snacks and the promise of rest in just a few hours--but it didn’t last. After a little over an hour watching Luke start arguments with Han and Wedge alternately and dodging Han’s attempts to get her to side with him regardless of the subject at hand, Leia slipped past the other rescuees and the soldiers sent to escort them and ducked into the cabin.

“You don’t have a copilot?” slipped out of her mouth instead of “May I come in?” when she reached it, because, well, she could count the number of times she’d been on a Rebellion vessel this size and not been assigned two pilots on zero fingers. Wouldn’t look good for the Rebellion if they lost a figurehead like her in something like a space crash.

The pilot, who had scars on his hands and long, glossy black hair tied into a neat bun with a colorfully-embroidered strip, looked up ruefully.

“Just me.” He turned back to the instruments panel and gave it a once-over with a quickness that only came with hammered-in routine. “I am—I am well qualified, if you’re concerned.”

“Oh.” Leia slipped into the co-pilot’s chair. Her cheeks felt hot. “No, that’s not what I—I mean, I was just surprised.”

He shrugged. “I think they were just short-staffed today. Rations is running a caravan off by the Waste, and Rogue and Y-Wing’s had training on the schedule for weeks.”

It had never stopped them before, she thought. The generals had always yanked someone out so she had a relief pilot with her wherever she went, just in case, no matter what was going on. Her father always insisted on it.

And then she thought, oh, of course.

“We haven’t met before,” she said to stop the sudden burn in her eyes. And then she leaned over a bit to take in his name tag and, oh, of course, she thought, again.

His lips curled up, just a little, when she pursed hers. “It’s all right, Your Highness.”

She twisted her fingers in the skirt of her dress. “Leia, please.”

He’d been on the ground, almost, when Jedha went. He’d piloted the ship away Saw Guerrera’s hideout; she’d read the report about the destruction of the city that Captain Andor had filed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. It wasn’t loud in the cabin, but the words carried clear enough.

His shoulders stiffened, and his hands tightened on the wheel, and for a moment she thought—I shouldn’t have brought it up, I should have let it go—but he settled back down with a deep breath out.

“You too,” he said.

Someone cursed particularly loudly down the hall, and he huffed a brittle laugh before turning his body to look at her.

Leia didn’t know what he saw, but it must have been all right, because he nodded his head at the copilot’s seat.

“You ever flown one of these?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Strap in,” he said, and smiled.

The next time Leia saw Bodhi, he was coming down the hall, grinning, still sweaty and in uniform from a recent mission, holding a pile of actual paper scrolls to his chest.

“Scrolls from the court of Queen Bahraz,” he said in answer to her look. “With a full hata from the poet Elphabin.”

She couldn’t read it, but she recognized classic Jedhan calligraphy when he unfurled a bit of it and showed her. His smile actually showed his teeth, and his fingers petted the outside of the scroll like a beloved cat when he rolled it back up.

“I’ve been making a collection,” he said, “whenever I can find some. Would you like to see them? We can order lunch.”

His mood was infectious, and they ate traditional Sintheten sandwiches over his desk while he taught her the major differences between poetry from the court of Bahraz and the court of Dhireen.

“Do you know anything about Alderaanian couplets?” he asked near the end.

Her fingers froze around her spoon. Her tongue wouldn’t move.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t take that class in the Academy. But it doesn’t matter.”

And that was that, and he didn’t bring it up again at all and didn’t spend several minutes telling her how sorry he was for having brought it up.

The next time she had an afternoon off, she took him to lunch in the mess and taught him all the couplets she’d memorized for her graduation recital.

It became a thing. Not a thing in the sly, suggestive, out-of-the-corner-of-his-mouth sort of way that Commander Yarit said one time when Leia headed to lunch with Bodhi after a mission with Han, but a thing she could drop into and feel welcome in without any dissembling.

It was so easy to drop, “I used to hate chiko pudding until the palace chef found me some with Tarva sweetener,” when the mess served Corellian style chiko custard,” or “My Anenil-Era Classics Master brought a pair of desert lizards to class one time, and his assistant accidentally trampled one of them,” or “One of my aunts wore that color too, and it looked almost as bad on her as it does on him.”

They didn’t always eat together, and they didn’t always eat alone. Sometimes Baze and Chirrut joined them, nagging Bodhi—and her, by extension—to eat enough so he could maybe work up the strength to actually land a hit on Baze in a spar; Luke and Wedge, occasionally, came in haflway through a meal fresh off squadron training and worked off the leftover adrenaline with very loud stories about ship mechanics; Jyn, Cassian, and Han, somehow, joined forces after meeting at dinner and started an ostensibly-underground gaming ring which, for a thief, a spy, and a smuggler they absolutely failed at keeping quiet; and one time Kaytoo came up behind Bodhi while Bodhi was slurping down some rather hot soup, patted him very hard on the back, and congratulated him on improving his skills in human interaction.

But sometimes it was just the two of them, and sometimes they skipped dinner and headed out to a quiet spot--even easier to find once they moved to Crait--where no one else was watching who wouldn’t understand.

“I miss the nights in Jedha,” Bodhi said one time when they were walking outside in the sunset. Even in the evenings did the salt-sand underneath their feet seem to simmer, and spots that were merely damp after work on the fabrics on their necks and underarms turned quickly soaking wet and heavy. So, “I miss the nights in Jedha,” Bodhi said, and went on with, “it got so cold in the spring sometimes that my sister and I would take our blankets and bunk down in the living room by the heater.”

It was just that, at first, that he mentioned a few times, but eventually—eventually, one time when the mess was too loud so they walked over two miles away from the base and sat down on the sand to watch the sunset—he told her how they fixed the heating and insulation on the upper floors with money from his sister’s first proper publication; Leia, in return, told him of the first time she’d hosted a state dinner, for diplomats from the Harloff system, and of how proud her parents had been of her.

Neither of them cried. Bodhi didn’t even tear up or sniff, though he passed her a traditionally embroidered Jedhan handkerchief from his pocket, just in case, but they sat together until the sun dipped down behind the horizon, shoulder to shoulder in the scorching heat.

She’d forgotten to put sun cream on her face, she later discovered, and Han teased her softly about her bright pink cheeks and sunburned lips for days afterwards.

“I never got sunburns on Alderaan,” she told him, then, and he stopped.

She missed the rain and the mornings, and she missed the green. She didn’t tell him that, nor Bodhi, either, but they understood it just the same.

“Leia!”

There weren’t many men on base who called her that, even with her prompting, and she’d just seen the other two set off to run a training sim on the Falcon.

Bodhi was in his uniform again, clearly just returned from another mission, and besides the two books tucked under his arm, he held a small, potted plant wrapped in soft blue tissue paper. “It’s not—it isn’t much. And it was the easiest to find from the Alderaanian garden books I’ve seen. But we found a wholesaler who had some, and we thought you’d like one.”

“I’m sure it’s fine.” Leia took the plant and tugged the tissue paper out of the way. A calante. It was no wonder it had been easy to find; it was one of Alderaan’s biggest exports, as it grew like a weed all over the planet and flourished in a variety of environments. The leaves were a deep, glossy green, with small, colorful flower clusters. It had been the commonest of flowers on Alderaan, and she’d rarely seen it inside the palace except for dinners celebrating the horticultural unions. But here on Hoth—when she crushed a sliver of a leaf with her fingers--it was soft. Fresh. Right.

“Thank you,” she said. “Very much.”

Bodhi said something polite—she didn’t really catch what—and left. Leia ducked into a dark corner, making sure no one was watching, and headed down a shortcut to the storage room behind the mess. She should put it in one of the common rooms, maybe, or by the memorial where people left lockets and letters and other beloved mementos. Bodhi, she knew, scanned all the books he found and gave out data sticks like ration bars to every archivist or diaspora Jedhan that he met. For one brief moment, Leia considered starting a garden.

But instead she stole some twine and a screwdriver from the stores and rigged it up to hang securely in the corner over the bunk she shared with Han on the Falcon, where she’d see it first thing in the morning whenever they went on a mission together.

“I was wondering what he was up to,” was all Han said later when he saw it. He set his hands on her braids and stroked his thumbs gently along her temple until she rested her head on his shoulder. “He asked me about horticultural warehouses last week. Was it the right one?”

The calante’s leaves dipped with the rocking of the ship, bright even in the dimmed night lights of the cabin. If she closed her eyes, Leia thought, she could almost smell it, even with its leaves intact. She settled into Han’s embrace and took an experimental sniff and let it sit.

“It’s good,” she said. “It’s home.”


End file.
